I’ve been meaning to add SSL to my site for a while and now it’s done! All the glory and wonder of SSL without much work.

I’m using CloudFlare’s free flexible SSL certificate. It may not be the best of the best, but it works well and is pretty easy to set up. I’ve enabled it on many sites and only one, this one, gave me any issues.

I was going to do a big writeup on how you can get it up and running, but it seems iControlWp already has a great writeup; which I found out after I screwed something up. Scroll down to their Step-by-Step How To section and don’t forget step #1.

The weird part about going this route to enable SSL on your site is you don’t need to do a find and replace for insecure URLs in your database. The thousands of posts I have are all magically updated. I assume that’s because iControlWp’s plugin is doing a filter on my content to update all the URLs, but still, that’s pretty impressive. You will have to manually update any theme files though that may have hard-coded URLs to http resources.

I didn’t go https because I needed to, I enabled it because that seems to be the way of the web. After enabling https on other sites, I notice no difference in web traffic, or usability, or anything. It works the same and is just a bit more secure. Why not increase security?

Oh, and for those wondering why I didn’t use Let’s Encrypt, it’s because I don’t get it. I love the fact that it’s free, but the instructions are still super nerdy and over my head. It’s probably easier than I think, but right now, CloudFlare is much easier and gets the job done.